I know some of you will openly groan when I say this but I decided to reach out to Mandycan yesterday and we actually had a really good talk. They didn't want everything we talked about shared but they gave me permission to talk about the things most relevant to this thread. I reached out to him because I saw people were treating him like crap and trying to cancel him and I was like:
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So, that established, I first and foremost wanted to see if he was alright because people suck. We got to talking and then we got down to business (to defeat the Huns). Yes, he had been told the 12th and I also found out through my own network that Zippo and Markomaro were too and I saw the conversations and screenshots to prove it. That said, everyone was bamboozled so nobody should be an asshole about that. Like I said, Direct dates are super hard to nail to begin with so a Nintendo insider getting this wrong is like the smallest of Ls they could take.
From there, I asked the question that was on everyone's minds: was Byleth a lucky guess or was he outright told Byleth? To my surprise, he was outright told Byleth in October and provided proof that this conversation happened. What happened next was even more fascinating and why I'm making this post. He then shared with me that his contact told him three characters in October. You all know the first two: Byleth and Crash but he was actually told a third character before Crash but didn't make this public. This character was Geno.
Obviously, this peaked my interest and I asked the circumstances surrounding this. He said he was told Geno after Byleth but his contact came back to him a couple of days later, gave him Crash, and then told him "don't expect Geno anytime soon." This is why Mandycan is predicting Crash for 6, because his contact said Geno was happening but much later. Again, this makes sense because this all went down in October which, painfully enough, was already four months ago. So, once again, we have yet another insider who I didn't have a connection to until yesterday who has a contact that has also heard Geno. Groovy.
So, another thing that's interesting is that this contact was able to cut through the crap to name Byleth as 5. This contact, however, did not tell Mandycan that Crash was 6, just that he was coming. Crash being 6 is Mandycan's personal prediction based on the timing of the info. This is particularly interesting because we once again have yet another insider that has no firm answer on who 6 actually is. Whoever 6 is, Nintendo is going above and beyond to keep them secret, even more so than Byleth. Once again, in my personal opinion, this suggests to me that Nintendo wants 6 to be a big surprise and wants their reveal to have as big of an impact as possible. Fun stuff. So, in short, Mandycan has a legit source and a surprising amount of his intel lines up with mine so I'm happy that he's now in my network too.
